David Issacs

David Issacs

The Northern Hood

RMIT University, Master of Architecture, Graduate Project 2013

Anne Butler Memorial Medal & Leon van Schaik Medal (peer selected)

Supervisors: Michael Spooner & Anna Johnson

The Northern Hood does three things for Northcote. It rescales the idea of the household living room to the scale of the urban environment. It consolidates existing site relationships to provide Northcote with a city centre. Amplifies the existing character, culture and vibrancy of Northcote’s High Street.
The questions being investigated in this project are designed to be a model for transitioning towns like Northcote undergoing rapid densification by way of gentrification. At an urban scale the project negotiates each of the context relationships through a broad brush approach. This is designed to assist in the legibility of the proposal from key vantage points such as the Northcote theatre and library.
In this model of architecture form has been carved and formed via the negotiations of consolidating site relationships and by a pushing and pulling of the various proposed program’s against the interior courtyard public spaces that weave between them. Northcote’s character and identity is enriched in this “public living room” that extends the local residences and homes, ” and takes on the identity of the town, where idiosyncratic details, forgotten memories and local details are rescaled, stretched redeployed to inform a rich vivid spatial condition to be used by the diverse community that makes up Northcote.
This project has allowed me to continue my ongoing interest in craft and detail, this architecture is as much about the one to one, the way people engage and use architectural elements and surfaces as it is about the overall form.